Miniaturization of enantioselective detectors.
Explore the source record for details and available documents.
Biomedical subjects
Publications and source records attributed to D R Bobbitt.
Explore the source record for details and available documents.
The monitoring of food materials for antibiotic residues is an area of increasing concern and importance due to the potential impact on human health. Large-scale screening applications require methods that are rapid, accurate, provide low detection limits and are free from interference. The problem is further complicated by the wide range of chemical functionalities and modes of operation exhibited by the antibiotic materials of physiological significance in use today. As demonstrated, chromatographic methods provide many of the advantages necessary for screening applications. Judicious choice of sample preparation method, separation mode and detection strategy can provide significant immunity from problems associated with the food matrix. Gas chromatography can provide extremely high separation efficiencies, however, only a limited number of antibiotic compounds are inherently volatile enough for direct analysis by gas chromatography. Derivatization to enhance the volatility of the antibiotic is one approach to overcome this limitation. Among the methods available, reversed-phase high-performance liquid chromatography is used extensively for the analysis of many antibiotic systems as it does not require derivatization and it combines relatively high separation efficiencies with low detection limits. The diverse group of properties exhibited by the antibiotic materials in use today suggests that the choice of detection strategy is a key component in the successful development of an analysis technique. Derivatization of the antibiotic material is frequently used to add either a fluorogenic of chromogenic moiety to the antibiotic compound to enhance detection. Derivatization procedures suffer from several limitations which are problematic when making measurements in complicated food matrices. Among the different detection modes utilized for antibiotic analysis, polarimetric detection has the potential to provide extremely selective detection of most antibiotic materials, and this selective response can minimize many of the constraints placed upon the separation system by the sample matrix. Although many of the separation modes used for antibiotic analysis are well developed, separations based on capillary electrophoretic methods have much potential in the field of antibiotic analysis. Future investigations are needed to extend the generality of these techniques and expand their use into the field of food analysis.
A new approach to the production of optical fiber sensors is described which is based on a dynamic modification procedure. In this approach, the optical fiber surface is rendered hydrophobic through the covalent attachment of a C18 moiety. Specific sensing ligands are then associated with this surface through either their inherent or designed hydrophobicity. To investigate the feasibility of the approach, an optical fiber sensor has been constructed for riboflavin binding protein in which 3-octylriboflavin is associated with the fiber surface. Fluorescence quenching occurs upon binding of the protein to the immobilized riboflavin derivative. The sensor possesses a minimum measurable quantity of 7.3 pmol of binding protein in a probe volume which is less than 10 microL. With this approach, the sensing surface was repetitively regenerated 15 times over a 1-h period with less than a 5% variation in sensor-to-sensor performance. The approach is general, and with minor variations it can be used in a variety of sensing situations.